"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
Edmund Burke. What happened on this Day in History?

Monday, November 5, 2012

This Day in History: Nov 5, 1605: King James learns of gunpowder plot by Guy Fawkes

Early in the morning, King James I of England learns
that a plot to explode the Parliament building has been foiled, hours
before he was scheduled to sit with the rest of the British government
in a general parliamentary session.

At about midnight on the night
of November 4-5, Sir Thomas Knyvet, a justice of the peace, found Guy
Fawkes lurking in a cellar under the Parliament building and ordered the
premises searched. Some 20 barrels of gunpowder were found, and Fawkes
was taken into custody. During a torture session on the rack, Fawkes
revealed that he was a participant in an English Catholic conspiracy to
annihilate England's Protestant government and replace it with Catholic
leadership.

What became known as the Gunpowder Plot was organized
by Robert Catesby, an English Catholic whose father had been persecuted
by Queen Elizabeth I
for refusing to conform to the Church of England. Guy Fawkes had
converted to Catholicism, and his religious zeal led him to fight in the
Spanish army in the Netherlands. Catesby and the handful of other
plotters rented a cellar that extended under Parliament, and Fawkes
planted the gunpowder there, hiding the barrels under coal and wood.

As
the November 5 meeting of Parliament approached, Catesby enlisted more
English Catholics into the conspiracy, and one of these, Francis
Tresham, warned his Catholic brother-in-law Lord Monteagle not to attend
Parliament that day. Monteagle alerted the government, and hours before
the attack was to have taken place Fawkes and the explosives were
found. By torturing Fawkes, King James' government learned of the
identities of his co-conspirators. During the next few weeks, English
authorities killed or captured all the plotters and put the survivors on
trial, along with a few innocent English Catholics.

Guy Fawkes
himself was sentenced, along with the other surviving chief
conspirators, to be hanged, drawn, and quartered in London. Moments
before the start of his gruesome execution, on January 31, 1606, he
jumped from a ladder while climbing to the hanging platform, breaking
his neck and dying instantly.
In 1606, Parliament established November 5 as a day of public thanksgiving.

Today, Guy Fawkes Day is celebrated across Great Britain every year on
November 5 in remembrance of the Gunpowder Plot. As dusk falls,
villagers and city dwellers across Britain light bonfires, set off
fireworks, and burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, celebrating his failure to
blow Parliament and James I to kingdom come.